


Look

by awed_frog



Category: Supernatural
Genre: A Bit Not Good, Coda, Episode: s11e03 The Bad Seed, Everyone Needs A Hug, Guilty Dean, M/M, Season/Series 11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-23
Updated: 2015-10-23
Packaged: 2018-04-27 19:07:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5060494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awed_frog/pseuds/awed_frog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cas waits for a second, and then he moves his hand forward, as if to touch Dean’s, before changing his mind and stilling in mid-gesture.</p>
<p>“Everyone deserves to be loved.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Look

**Author's Note:**

> FFS, guys, are you trying to kill us all? I mean, honestly? _Honestly?_

“Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out; though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love.”  
JK Rowling, _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_

 

Dean had hoped Cas would understand. Or accept his wishes, at any rate. After all, these days Cas seems more than ready to follow their advice on bloody anything - Dean glances back at Sam, thinks he’ll need to get to the bottom of this supposed deal Sam (and apparently Cas) made with Rowena, then gives up for the night: he feels a headache incoming. This discussion will have to wait.

God, he’s so _not_ looking forward to it.

Without even noticing he’s doing it, he shifts his gaze to Cas instead, and finds Cas staring at him. He looks - broken, somehow, and this makes Dean feel even worse. Here's something else that’s on him. He thinks, fleetingly, about the motherfucking angel of the Lord who walked into that barn seven years ago - he can still see it, all of it - Cas’ cocksure smile, the way he’d just looked down in - in bloody disbelief, perhaps, or even amused compassion at Dean’s stupidity - at the knife sticking out of his chest, and pulled it out. He thinks, inevitably, about his wind-swept hair. About the fucking _wings_. 

Yeah, so maybe Cas had been a bit of a bastard back then. When he’d threatened to throw Dean back in the Pit, Dean had felt it inside his bones like a cold ache - he’d been shaky for weeks afterwards - he’d heard that low, silky growl again and again ( _I dragged you out of Hell; I can throw you back in_ ). On one memorable occasion, he’d thought he’d seen Cas in his bathroom mirror - he’d jumped so bad he’d cut himself shaving, nearly severed his fucking artery and fucking died.

But, son of a bitch or not, Cas had been _strong_. Confident and completely whole. Even happy, in his own way. 

And look at him now.

_That’s on me_ , Dean thinks, again, and he looks up at the ceiling, presses the ice bag on the left side of his face so that Cas is completely hidden from his view.

Despite the moderate good day they had (Cas cured of the curse, the _Codex_ back in their hands, and, finally, a hit on Cas’ stupid Pimpmobile just West of Baton Rouge), the silence around the table quickly turns sour. Sam keeps looking at Dean, half guilty, half furtive, and even after Dean physically turns his back on him, he can still feel Sam’s agonized glances on the back of his head, and they’re making his headache even worse. And Cas, well - Dean has no idea what Cas is doing, zilch, because he’s not looking at Cas. He’s really not.

“I’ll - er - I’ll go to bed,” says Sam, after a very long ten minutes. “If you want to leave in the morning, I need some sleep.”

“I don’t _want_ to,” Dean points out. “What I _want_ is to stay here and catch up on all the _Fairytail_ episodes I missed when I was out destroying the world. And also, you know, chat about our feelings and all that.”

Dean should be used by now by how quickly Sam’s expression can go from _Don’t hit me, I love you_ to _Are you fucking kidding me_ \- he’s been enjoying the phenomenon for more than twenty years, after all - and yet every time it happens it brings a smile to his lips.

“But, well, we never get what we want, do we?”

“Good night, _Dean_ ,” says Sam, pointedly, so he can avoid saying, _And fucking go to bed already, don’t stay up and drink until you pass out like you usually do because I don’t feel like driving to Louisiana on my bloody own_.

Dean smiles up at him and sort of winks, even if he has only one functioning eyebrow and the gesture comes out a bit stilted.

He hears Sam mumbling under his breath as he disappears towards his room, and then he lowers the ice bag and takes a swig of beer. He does it slowly and carefully, and yet he still manages to bite into his broken lip.

_Dammit._

“I wish you’d let me -”

“Yeah, what did I just say? We never get what we want, Cas. Get used to it.”

He hadn’t meant to sound so aggressive. God, this _fucking_ headache. And, of course, Cas can’t drop it. 

“How is that different, Dean? I don’t understand.”

_Jesus._

“I _chose_ it, Cas, okay? I _chose_ to have the bloody Mark.”

“Dean -”

“And you, you never asked to be cursed. You were hurt because of -”

_Sam_ , he’s about to say, and he lets the thought explode inside his mind, and then fade away, because it would be unfair to hold a grudge against his brother when he still doesn’t know exactly what happened. 

Also, this - Dean and Sam fighting - is exactly what Rowena wants. She is Crowley’s mother, after all. It’d be stupid to trust even one single word that comes out of her conniving and Chanel-lipsticked mouth.

Cas doesn’t say anything. He’s still wearing that defeated, puppy-eye look that irritates the hell out of Dean. He doesn’t deserve that much loyalty and affection. He just doesn’t.

“So no, Cas, it’s not the same,” he says, a bit savagely, when he realizes that Cas is waiting for him to finish the sentence.

“Dean, you took the Mark because -”

“Don’t you _dare_ ,” says Dean standing up. He’s thinking, vaguely, that he might go into the kitchen and get a bag of frozen peas, or something, but mostly he wants to get away from Cas, because he’s getting angrier by the minute and he has no right to. “Don’t say I was trying to do the right thing. All this shit - everything that happened in the past ten years of my life - all the people who _died_ \- that’s on _me_ , Cas. Me fucking doing the right thing. Dad dying - that’s my fault. The Apocalypse - also my fault. Bobby -”

“Your father made his own choices. And The Apocalypse was hardly your fault.”

Dean had finally managed to start to walk away, but now he marches right back, leans over the table, gets right into Cas’ face.

“I wasn’t _supposed_ to go to Hell. I went to Hell because - oh, wait - because ‘I was trying to do the right thing’, Cas,” he almost growls, sketching the quotation marks with his fingers. “Because I thought saving my brother was the right thing to do. Except Sam wouldn’t have needed saving if -”

Dean tries to stop the sentence from coming out, but it’s such an obvious truth, and it’s been eating at Dean for such a long time, there is no way he can hold back, not now.

“- if I hadn’t forced him to come with me in the first place.”

“Dean -”

“Sam was fucking _happy_ , Cas. He had Jesse, he was in Stanford - it was all he ever wanted. He never wanted to be a hunter.”

“I’m sure he -”

“Oh, _believe_ me, I _know_ he didn’t. You weren’t there - all the fights he had with dad as a kid -”

Dean stops talking. This irrational fury inside him is about to boil over, and, again, Dean tries and fails to keep it in check. It’s probably a bit of everything - those disturbing dreams about the Darkness, and his face split down the middle, this fucking headache - and Cas is not helping. Cas _can’t_ help. That's part of the problem as well.

“So don’t talk to me about me doing the right thing. That’s exactly what I _never_ do. Only _you_ could disagree with that,” he adds, with as much venom as he can muster, but Cas’ expression doesn’t change, and the fact he doesn’t react to the insult in any way makes Dean even angrier. “I dragged him back in because I didn’t want to be alone. How is that right, Cas?”

Cas waits for a second, as though making sure this isn’t a rhetorical question, and then he moves his hand forward, as if to touch Dean’s, before changing his mind and stilling in mid-gesture.

“Everyone deserves to be loved.”

Dean actually laughs at that, a cruel, bitter laugh.

“Really,” he says. “ _Really?_ You’re going to go with love? You know what - I can’t even - I’m going to bed.”

Raising his hands as if to physically push Cas’ bullshit away from himself, Dean straightens up, takes a few steps away from the table and treis to calm down. There’s still a book he’d meant to check out, he thinks, vaguely; he turns his back on Cas, walks to the library. He knows it’s something to do with the Demon Tablet - something had been bugging him about -

“I still wish you’d let me heal you. You won’t sleep well if you’re in pain.”

There is so much concern in Cas’ voice Dean freezes and turns around.

“Haven’t you been listening to _one word I said_?” he asks, incredulously. “ _Jesus_ , Cas. Just drop it.”

“I understand you feel guilty, but I still think you shouldn’t. You were under a compulsion when you hurt me. A powerful one. Far more powerful than the one Rowena put on me when I hurt you.”

So it looks like this, right here, is the downside of not allowing Cas inside his mind any longer: Dean will have to spell it out. He grits his teeth.

“The bloody difference is,” he says, “that Rowena’s spell had nothing to do with you. But that Mark - the Mark was not _on_ me, Cas. It _was_ me.”

Dean really, really doesn’t want to say this, but, hey, when does he ever get what he wants?

“I could feel it happening - that thing - it sort of intensified everything I was feeling. Anger, sadness, guilt. It all went nuclear. But they were my feelings to start with. When I was skanking up with Crowley - that was me, Cas. The karaoke, the pool games, the sex - it was all me. All those times I beat the crap out of some asshole - me. And when I killed the dickbag who wanted to waste his wife - still me.”

He stops again, clenches his hands into fists. He’s tried not to think about this, but well. And it has all turned to bile in his mouth now - a disgusting, poisonous mess, and Dean needs to spits it out.

“I _liked_ doing those things, Cas. That was _me. All_ of it. And the worst is - I met people like that. Hunters, even. Those _Kill everybody and God will recognize his own_ kind of guys - and Sam - Sam is the _only_ reason I’m not like that without the Mark. Sam forced me to change, but I didn’t change enough. I’m still an asshole, and I still do everything wrong, and I deserve this - all of this.”

“You can’t believe that,” says Cas, and he sounds concerned now, because he still doesn’t bloody get it. “The Mark was preying on you, Dean. It made you feel things you would normally never -”

“I wanted to kill you,” Dean says, loud and clear, cutting Cas’ sentence in half. “That was me as well.”

For the first time since they got back to the Bunker, Cas’ expression changes. That whipped affection Dean resents so much gives way to surprise and puzzlement.

“I don’t understand.”

“I can’t stand it, okay?” says Dean, and then, all of a sudden, his legs gives out from under him, and he slides to the floor, lets his head drop back against the cluttered bookcase. “Everything you went through is my fault,” he adds, in a whisper, and he closes his eyes.

Cas doesn’t say anything to that. In fact, there’s no sound at all apart from Dean’s own heart beating an erratic, panicked rhythm inside his chest. Then again, Cas doesn’t breathe, never fiddles. With his eyes closed, Dean has no way of knowing if Cas is still there or not. For all he knows, he’s found a way to teleport himself the shit out of here. But just in the case he hasn’t, just in the case Cas is dumb enough to stay here and take it, Dean says it.

“And I know you’ll try to deny it, to make me feel better about it. But you said it, okay? You said the words, and you can’t take that back. _I did it, all of it, for you_.”

“You remember,” says Cas, somberly, and the sound of his voice is just -

“Of course I bloody _remember_. It was a pretty dramatic thing to say.”

“You never mentioned it. I thought you didn’t care.”

Dean opens his eyes and laughs bitterly.

“Right.”

“Dean -”

“So, yeah, sometimes when you go away I think - first I’m angry, because what the fuck - you up and vanish without telling us where you’re going, and if you’re even coming back - but then, after a while, I think, _Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe if he doesn’t come back - maybe if he’s not around anymore, all the goddamn time, maybe I won’t feel guilty anymore, about none of it_ \- about forcing you to choose me, to betray Heaven, to Fall. Which I know wasn’t my fault, except, well, it sort of was.”

Cas goes very still. His face is completely bloodless.

“I had no idea my presence caused you such pain,” he says, slowly. “It was never my intention to hurt you. I - I will go. I will leave, now, if it will make you feel better.”

Dean presses his hands on his face, feels the edges of bruises he’d forgotten all about, and he hisses in pain.

“Jesus, Cas.”

Cas looks at Dean, then away. He scans the room instead, as if he’s trying to memorize it, or to check for forgotten items. Then he stands up, adjusts his trenchcoat around his shoulders.

“Say bye to Sam for me,” he says, stoically, and he’s taken two steps towards the door before Dean manages to force out a weak, “Wait.”

Cas doesn’t wait, though. He doesn’t even turn around. He just keeps walking, and Dean, with a few choice curses, stands up and runs after him.

“I said, _wait_ ,” he says, grabbing Cas’ sleeve.

Cas is already on the first step of the staircase. He looks down at Dean’s hand on his arm.

“I never wanted to hurt you, Dean,” he repeats, and Dean can’t - there’s so much he wants to say to Cas, so much he needs to explain, but he doesn’t have the words for it; he never did. 

A dozen witty repartees and dirty jokes chase one another inside his mind, and Dean push them aside, all of them. This is not something he can fix with a wink, and Cas has never been good at reading between the lines anyway. He doesn’t get that sometimes _Go away_ means _Stay with me_ ; that _I don’t deserve you_ means _Please love me anyway_ ; that _I don’t want to talk about it_ means _Just tell me it’s not true because I’m bleeding and terrified and I will die from the pain of this_.

And he certainly doesn’t understand what Dean has been trying to say - that if he can’t stand Cas’ presence, it’s because Cas cares too much about him, and because he himself cares too much about Cas, and the whole thing scares the crap out of him. He’s afraid Cas will one day notice (because he’s noticed before) that Dean isn’t worth it after all. He’s afraid Cas might get killed if he sticks with them. Most of all, he’s afraid he’ll never be able to tell Cas, to make him understand - and right now, Cas is leaving because of him, because Dean screwed up again, and he doesn’t know how to fix it, doesn’t know how to say it -

\- and then he realizes he doesn’t, in fact, need to say anything.

“What I meant to say - it came out wrong, Cas. Of course I don’t want you to leave,” he says, his fingers tightening on Cas’ arm. “You know I don’t - just look, okay? _Look_.”

Cas frowns at him. Dean is used to look down to look at Cas, if only just, and having to look up instead, having to raise his head up and seeing Cas’ piercingly blue eyes is unsettling him all over again; is reminding him that they are not, in fact, on the same level; that Cas is incredibly powerful and that sometimes Dean is still afraid of him. Mostly _for_ him, though. What they have between them is fucking complicated, he thinks; and perhaps trying to sort it out when he has a black eye and a broken jaw and hasn’t slept in twenty-six hours is not the best idea in the world.

“Look where?” asks Cas, and Dean licks his lips, because his mouth has gone dry.

“Inside,” he says, quickly, before he can chicken out, because he needs to do this - he owes Cas that much.

Cas tilts his head to the side then, just a tiny bit, like he used to, and when he accepts the truth of what Dean is offering, he automatically takes a step back, almost stumbles against the step because he’s obviously completely forgotten where he is. 

“You asked me to stop doing that,” he says, uncertainly.

“And now I’m asking you to do it. Just - don’t look at the porn, okay?” Dean adds, trying to joke and failing miserably. “Just look at why I want you to stay. Please.”

It’s the last word that does it. Cas knows Dean hates begging. Even his prayers are weirdly constructed things in which the word _please_ is, more often than not, shouted or forced out in exasperation.

Cas nods, comes down until he’s standing right in front of Dean, and Dean lets go of his arm and steels himself. Cas raises his hand as if to touch his ruined face, then he squares his shoulders and takes a deep breath.

Dean feels it happening, all of it. Because, well, of course Cas starts to bloody glow, even if it’s nothing too dramatic, and then his eyes go even bluer, but there’s other things - there’s this feeling inside him, like a beetle walking on the inside of his skull, something which is not quite pleasant but is so faint as to be barely noticeable; and there’s a sort of warmth tingling all over his skin - Cas' Grace pressing up against him, Dean realizes, and he'd be terrified if it didn't feel so soft and soothing and utterly _right_. 

Dean relaxes into the feeling, because he was sure expecting something far more embarrassing and painful than this - maybe a replay of all the times he has stared at Cas when Cas wasn’t looking, or, worse, a full technicolor rendition of his Purgatory prayers, which had grown more and more pathetic as time went on. Instead, well, this is all there is to it: Cas standing in front of him looking like something out of _Blade Runner_ , Cas looking beautiful and scary and achingly familiar and a million miles away; and the Bunker quiet and dark around them. 

A sort of friend; a sort of house. It’s a lot, really, and way more than he deserves.

Just as Dean is getting used to the sensation, Cas takes a deep breath and sort of powers down. The glow around him flutters and disappears, and his eyes turn back to their normal shade of blue.

Dean just watches him. There is nothing he can say, really. This is it: the moment Cas will either walk away for good, or -

Cas steps forward and hugs him, a bit messily and a bit awkwardly, but with such strength Dean has to lean back into him to avoid falling over.

“You should have said,” Cas whispers against his hair, and Dean brings his own hands up, fists them in Cas’ ridiculous trenchcoat.

“Well, now you know,” he replies, gruffly.

They don’t move for a time that seems stupidly long, and at the exact moment Dean starts to worry he’ll embarrass himself, Cas steps back. His right hand follows the curve of Dean’s back up to his left shoulder and stops there.

“It doesn’t matter to me if you’re not ready,” Cas says seriously, because trust him to say something girly at the exact wrong moment. “I’ll wait.”

Dean looks away, a bit red-faced, and his eyes fall on Cas’ hand instead, at where and how Cas placed it, right over the scar which is now barely visible on his skin.

“I’m sorry I’m not -” he says, then clears his throat. “It’s not because you’re a dude, or anything. Because, obviously, you’re not, and I -”

Dean stops again, thinks he’s probably going to win the championship of broken sentences tonight. Then again, Cas knows now. And he knows Dean needs more time to put himself back together; right now, there’s simply not enough - he’s got nothing to offer. He’s just too broken; too messed-up.

“Just - stick around, okay?” 

Cas nods and lets his hand fall. They stare at each other, a bit awkwardly, until Dean clears his throat again.

“We should probably get some shut-eye,” he says, trying to sound practical instead of painfully self-conscious. “The room you stayed in last time - Sam turned it into the freaking Situation Room.”

“Situation Room?”

“Yeah, you know. Pictures on the walls, pieces of coloured string. The works. I told him we had a board for that, but he said - he seems to think I keep my music too loud, and that he needs a place with a door that closes to do his nerdy stuff.”

Castiel looks at him curiously, and Dean rolls his eyes.

“It’s an argument we’ve been having for twenty years - trust me, you don’t want to get in the middle of it,” he says. “So, anyway, that room is taken. But I -”

Dean stops again.

“There’s plenty of space in my room, if you want.”

There. He said it. _Jesus_. Seven fucking _years_ \- a fucking world _record_ is what it is.

Cas looks at him; his expression softens, and this time Dean doesn’t find this naked affection in Cas’ eyes quite so irritating as he did earlier in the evening.

“I do,” says Cas, and Dean finds he’s smiling, and fuck his messed-up face - this is well worth the pain.


End file.
